I shall find some excuse, I plotted. I shall make her return to Constantinople, where we shall be safe in my master’s house.
But that was impossible, for winter had already begun and no excuse could be worth the risk of a journey across Turkey in the snows. And Esmikhan braved that snow there in Konya to throw herself into a pilgrim’s devotions with renewed frenzy so that any suggestion of her boredom or wasting time was easily seen to be out of the question. As for myself, all thought of religion and its consolations had vanished from my mind. If they did enter at all, it was in the form of some exclamation, “Oh, God, help me now,” or “If You do exist, You certainly are not the Compassionate One the Muslims call You. You are rather more like the wicked boy who has caught a bird in this trap and then insists on torturing it to death!”
Then the correspondence began.
At first it came by the governor’s little son, for whom Ferhad was a great favorite. I soon caught him and gave him such a scolding—all about women and honor, and did he never want to grow up to become like the hero of a popular romance? After that they began to use his sister, who was also still so young that she could go throughout the house at will. Fortunately, I was able to convince her father, in general terms, that she was old enough to begin confinement. Then they coerced one of my own seconds, and in my anger I sold him immediately and at a great loss.
Notes came in bushels of apples and went out (Allah forbid) in the family’s copy of Rumi’s poems. A bunch of autumn crocuses appeared in my lady’s room—they could only have been picked by one with liberty to ramble about the hillside. I never was actually told who had done that rambling, but the fact that the stamens pulled from the centers of those flowers found their way into the flavorful rice upon which Ferhad broke his fast the next evening gave me a rather secure guess.
But I also began to see messages where there were none. One day I discovered a vase of forced hawthorn in my lady’s room. Angrily, I had it thrown out, only to discover that she had collected it and gone to all the care and trouble to make it bloom, and set it there herself only to brighten the place. It was not from Ferhad at all. Still, between the one note I caught and the next, their love and intimacy was swollen, leapt from buds to full blooms like flowers in springtime seem to have if one fails to go in the garden every day. Some communications were still getting through, in spite of all my care.
One day I tried to present my concerns to the governor in less vague terms than I had used for the matter of his daughter.
“Our Ferhad?” he asked, incredulous. “Women are the farthest thing from his mind. Horseflesh and training, that is all that concerns him. Why, I offered him a glass of my good red wine, obtained at great trouble and great expense from Cyprus. He didn’t condemn, he didn’t threaten to tell the vizier or any such thing; just refused politely but firmly to even indulge in that minor infraction. By Allah, I can’t drink myself with his virtue around! No doubt it’s just as well for my immortal soul, but it’s going to be a long, dry winter. I’ve no consolation but that wine improves with age.”
It seemed useless to confront the lovers themselves. They knew perhaps more than I the seriousness of their actions. Ferhad was nothing if not a man of honor and Esmikhan was a woman who often sat hours with me, fingering my hand in a silence that seemed to plead with me to save her from herself. They both held high positions for which many others would envy them: the one, Grand Master of the Imperial Horse; the other, the wife of the Grand Vizier and a daughter of the Sultan. Both of them filled those posts with more devotion than many a mortal could muster, but for that devotion, their mortality made them suffer more than another.
But suffering was food to the sort of idyllic, never-consummated, never-seen-face-to-face-in-the-light-of-day sort of love they possessed. A spahi prides himself on being able to endure more than another man; a woman gets no more pleasure than from the pains of childbirth. Such was the painful, helplessness of their love. After selling the traitor among my assistants, I could trust the rest to help me to the best of their abilities. Unfortunately, it was the khadim of greatest ability I had been forced to sell. I couldn’t replace him until our return to Constantinople, so all I had left with me were four persons who, for all their intentions, typified the worst infamy of eunuchs: the dull, fat, lazy stereotype from which we suffer. No, this trial was a test of my strength alone.
And it was a test. That impression came strongly one day when I caught Ferhad in the hall containing the grille to the harem, where he had no right to be. Without a word he bowed and left the room. The smile he gave me as he left was full of such sportsmanlike reserve that it might have gone equally well to the man who had just defeated him fair and square in a round of wrestling.
I do not mean by allusion to the ring from which both men generally walk away unharmed to belittle the seriousness of the test I was undergoing. If I did fail, blood would be shed. That a noblewoman’s virtue is sometimes set but low on men’s scale of values
